Pioneering computer science researcher Alan Turing proposed, in 1950, a thought experiment or game for answering the question, “can machines think?” The game became known as the “Turing Test,” and is commonly stated as follows: given a human interrogator and two respondents (one human and one machine), can the interrogator tell the respondents apart by means of a conversation or series of interactions? If not (i.e., if the interrogator cannot tell which respondent is human, or if the machine can fool the interrogator into believing that it is the human) then perhaps the machine is doing something like thinking.
At the time Turing wrote, machines were very far away from making a credible showing in such a test, but over the following decades, advances on a number of fronts have made the Loebner Prize, an annual Turing Test competition, into an entertaining and surprising showcase of state-of-the-art combinations of various foundational technologies. No program has yet won the gold medal by fooling half the judges in open-ended competition (while dealing with music, speech, pictures and video, as well as Turing's original typewritten text), but special-purpose programs have performed well in complex tasks such as the quiz, puzzle and language-processing game Jeopardy!®
The computational pieces that may eventually make up a Turing Test winner are even now good enough for many practical applications. For example, speech recognition is widely used in Interactive Voice Response (“IVR”) systems to process spoken commands and provide first-line customer telephone support; natural language processing (“NLP”) ingests human speech (ported to text) and attempts to find (or generate) a correct response; and speech synthesis can read text aloud to help the visually impaired.
Advances in these technologies, and new and creative combinations of them, are likely to continue to provide cost savings, improved services and valuable new experiences.